Forum:2019-08-16 (Friday)
Discussion for comic for . Ask not what your wiki can do for you, ask what you can do for your wiki. ---- Sneaky gate? What sneaky gate? Never heard of such a thing. Quantheory (talk) 00:18, August 15, 2019 (UTC) : I wonder how many times that file will be viewed early? Twenty (ten of us, twice each), or hundreds? Argadi (talk) 01:02, August 16, 2019 (UTC) :From their Facebook page, the Foglio's are at World Con in Ireland. An assistant is handling the comic page posts but wasn't given instructions on how to cross-post to Facebook. Hence the early sneaky gate postings. --Fred1740 (talk) 01:14, August 16, 2019 (UTC) Up officially now. Lucrezia's being almost as stupid as the rest of the cast, but that might be her default state. At least plot-wise this pretty much has to be the end of her possessing Agatha. --Geoduck42 (talk) 04:48, August 16, 2019 (UTC) : I don't know. A lot of the dramatic interest comes from Agatha's internal struggle. It's not exactly the classic dramatic struggle against oneself, but it's a struggle against her mother within herself, and all of us carry our parents inside, even though not so literally as Agatha. It seems to me that a Lucrezia-free Agatha will find everything else easy; she'll be like the Spark of the Realm, or Bill and Barry, having one foregone-conclusion adventure after another. So, although from an in-story perspective I'm obviously rooting for Agatha against Lucrezia, as a reader I'm not sure I'll like the tone of the story as much without Lu. Bkharvey (talk) 06:00, August 16, 2019 (UTC) :: There's also the possible tension of the dome being overrun and the team moving on with Lucrezia in control, but Lucrezia needing to help the team to survive and the team needing to depend on Lucrezia to survive. Argadi (talk) 08:31, August 16, 2019 (UTC) Ahh, good to see L-I-A got locked down quickly by Zeetha and Vi. I still am not sure it's a foregone conclusion just yet, as there's still the cleanup commandos and the incoming problem of Bang on the warpath. --MadCat221 (talk) 05:35, August 16, 2019 (UTC) : Indeed. Zeetha has been seeming a bit overwhelmed recently, and Violetta has only just gotten dressed again after that embarassing kidnapping, so it's especially satisfying that when push comes to shove they're totally ready to rumble. ➤ : Also satisfying that this is an all-female page, to the point that when Violetta wants to know if the machine can be fixed, she doesn't ask Tarvek, its principal architect, but Trelawney. The name "Girl Genius" always struck me as two-edged: A girl can be a genius, but there's only the one. (Yes, I know, the story quickly got past that.) Here we have a celebration of female initiative that really hits you over the head with the women-team-together spirit. ➤ : A little scary, though, that they haven't tied her down. Lucrezia is more energetic than this, letting two people keep her cornered when she isn't tied down. Compare this with the similar Lucrezia scene in Castle Heterodyne! Bkharvey (talk) 05:52, August 16, 2019 (UTC) ::Lucrezia/Agatha was riding a post revivification rush, just like Tarvek was. Both of them displayed super human strength and stamina. This is normal Lucrezia/Agatha. -- 13:42, August 16, 2019 (UTC) Re Bang: Maybe I'm being Pollyannaish about this, but I have hopes that all this time with Klaus has actually matured Bang past the need to fight Zeetha to someone's death. I'm looking for her to have an epiphany like Tarvek's in the Castle. It'll involve a lot of yelling, and maybe some low-grade fighting, but she's already gotten to where she can treat Tarvek like a human being for Gil's sake, and it's hard for me to imagine this story continuing without both Zeetha and Bang on the team. Bkharvey (talk) 06:09, August 16, 2019 (UTC) : It doesn't seem to me that Bang has matured that much (so far). But I can see some "Kato, now is not the time" situations. Argadi (talk) 08:31, August 16, 2019 (UTC) :: Speaking from painful personal experience, when people mature it sometimes takes a while for their behavior to catch up with their potential. Edit: Rereading, I see this was ambiguous. I mean, me maturing but not showing it for a long time. Some might say, not even yet. It will take a crisis (such as a confrontation with Zeetha) for Bang to stop operating on autopilot. But, think about the conversation. Zeetha: "I get that you personally didn't know about the circumstances in which your pirates were killed, so all this time you've been imagining some enemy attacking out of sheer malevolence. But now you do know: They kidnapped me, killed all my companions, and made it impossible for me ever to return home. Sorry, but I can't apologize for fighting back." Bang: "Umm..." What can she say to that? And (as we know from Jaron) it's not as if Bang can't fight and talk at the same time, so I expect to see the beginning of a fight to the death, some dramatic-looking but not fatal wounds on both sides, and then a panel in which they stare at each other, dripping blood, and Bang says "Oh, **** it." Or maybe she expresses it differently, but that's the idea. This may or may not involve helpful advice from Gil, to which Zeetha and Bang both say "Shut up!" at once. Bkharvey (talk) 09:59, August 16, 2019 (UTC) :: P.S. Weren't you surprised at Bang's talking to Tarvek about Gil? That's not someone thinking all problems can be solved by killing someone. That's what gives me hope--that last panel. Bkharvey (talk) 11:00, August 16, 2019 (UTC) They really do need to gag Lucrezia for a while. Even if they do avoid being tricked by her somehow, the last thing they need is for a revenant to stumble into this situation and take something she said as a command like Snaug did back at Castle Heterodyne. (Though at least they know none of the current party is likely to be a revenant since Honker hasn't been reacting.) I also find it interesting how bad Lucrezia is at pretending to be Agatha. Part of this is probably because she's a bit of a psychopath who has never had a "normal" direct interaction with Agatha, so she doesn't really have any way to understand how Agatha acts/thinks except through the "osmosis" of sharing a brain right now. But I also wonder if Bill was much more of a "stereotypical" or "ideal" hero when he was young (like Othar, or the original version of the Heterdyne Boys), and that's what Lucrezia's "good guy" act is based on. Maybe, before the Other War, Bill really was the sort of person who went around saying trite things like "With enough practice, one can overcome all sorts of obstacles!" Maybe his friends did tend to be the sort of people who would refuse to hit him even if he was being mind controlled and they needed to stop him. If Bill was that naive, it would explain how Lucrezia managed to get him to marry her. Quantheory (talk) 12:06, August 16, 2019 (UTC) : That is an interesting line of thought. I do think there have at least been hints that Bill Heterodyne was the kind of "ideal" hero you describe. ♦ : Back in the forum for Monday, June 24, I said this: :: The fact that Lucrezia has supposedly "gone quiet again" after just hearing her enemies planning to do the worst thing possible to her (from her perspective) strikes me as incredibly ominous. I am expecting that either she has already taken over Agatha or is gathering her strength for the strongest attack she can muster at just the right time to ruin the transfer process. ♦ :: If Lucrezia actually is in control of Agatha now, she is displaying the "consummate actress" skills that unlike a previous scene which left ♦ :: Now that I have made this guess, I've pretty much guaranteed that it won't happen. Good news for our heroes! -- William Ansley (talk) 13:23, June 24, 2019 (UTC) ♦ : I apologize for copying and pasting a big chunk of text that many, if not all, of you have already seen, but I thought the links in it were also relevant to this discussion. Lucrezia seems to have always been quite bad at pretending to be Agatha, and Kaus's comment about her acting abilities is even more puzzling with this new example. Perhaps he really was blinded by his infatuation with her. : Plus, this is one of the few times one of my predictions was more or less correct! (Not that I was the only person who had this idea.) I hope you will all forgive me for doing a bit of gloating. -- William Ansley (talk) 16:19, August 17, 2019 (UTC) ::I wonder how much of Lucrezia' personality is based on real-world psychopaths. Psychopaths tend to be good liars in certain situations, especially since they tend to enjoy manipulating others (and therefore get practice doing it), and they usually aren't afraid of being caught, so they can lie confidently and without "nervous" tells. ::But psychopaths also lack empathy, are self-absorbed, and tend to be too impulsive to maintain a very complex long-term deception. So they are not great general-purpose actors. A psychopath might be, say, a good snake-oil salesman that goes from town to town or investor to investor fleecing people. But they are not going to be any good as an undercover spy that has to study up on a particular backstory and be scrupulous and disciplined about how the act every day. Quantheory (talk) 20:39, August 17, 2019 (UTC) ::We do need to remember that the master-actress Lucrezia that Klaus knew is not automatically the same entity as the one calling herself that now. As she says to Tarvek soon after being downloaded into Agatha it had been a long time since she was "human". ----Geoduck42 (talk) 03:51, August 18, 2019 (UTC) Some of y'all, and some of the characters, too, are talking as if Lucrezia took over Agatha ages ago and just suddenly became a bad actor today. But to me it was made clear two pages ago that it was going Madness Place about the circuit mods to capture Lucrezia in a machine that made Agatha vulnerable to takeover by Lucrezia, i.e., it just happened minutes ago in-comic. I hope I'm right, because an Agatha not allowed to spark, instead relying on other people's help, like the time when she's back in the Castle days, has to mature further and focus on her role as a leader, rather than a direct doer. Bkharvey (talk) 01:08, August 18, 2019 (UTC) :I agree, Lucrezia's been pushing more and more, but she didn't fully take over until just now. As for Agatha not being able to Spark out later on, plotwise this really really needs to be head-Lucrezia's last hurrah. If she causes trouble in some new way after being extracted, fine, but she has to go. --Geoduck42 (talk) 03:51, August 18, 2019 (UTC) ::Re last hurrah: Doesn't Bruce Banner still turn into the Hulk when he gets angry? He's been doing that for, like, 50 years now! Bkharvey (talk) 03:58, August 18, 2019 (UTC) ::P.S. And we know that in The Future the Geisterdamen still think someone who looks a lot like Agatha is their goddess. Bkharvey (talk) 04:01, August 18, 2019 (UTC) ::P.P.S. Where are the musical Dingbots when we need them? (There is a Dingbot in the house; maybe it'll take some initiative about this.) Bkharvey (talk) 04:07, August 18, 2019 (UTC) Of course, "But it may take time" means that tomorrow's page will be more zentai ninjas. Bkharvey (talk) 07:45, August 18, 2019 (UTC) Hey, in panel 3, is that little white thing hanging down from Lucrezia's speech balloon a leftover tail from an earlier version of the speech balloon? Bkharvey (talk) 06:36, August 19, 2019 (UTC) Administrative Notice I have rolled back the changes I made to the "GG link" template to fix the http -> https redirect problem. The links generated by this template still seems to work. If anyone notices any problems, please respond to this post. I also finally figured out how to fix the template code that was adding the "Template" category to each new discussion forum page I created using the form at the top of the discussion forum "index page", which I had to manually remove each time. This has been irritating me for years now, but there are so many templates within templates within templates invoked in the code, it took until now for me to find the time and acquire the (bare minimum) knowledge I needed to figure this out. This makes me happy and it will be a benefit to anyone who takes over setting up the discussion forums after me. I don't have any intention of stopping my involvement with this wiki any time soon, but no one ever knows what the future will bring. -- William Ansley (talk) 14:34, August 17, 2019 (UTC)